Piano Quartet (2012)

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Having created three works to piano music by John Cage – In a Landscape, Why the Brook Wept, and furthermore – and with a deep appreciation of his tremendous influence on the development of western music forms, Peggy marked the 2012 centenary of Cage’s birth with a new work in his honour. Peggy writes:

Immediately following its publication in 1996, I began working my way through the dense and stimulating MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words Art Music (John Cage, Joan Retallack). Cage had died four years earlier, and this book documented an extraordinary series of in-depth interviews in the last months of his life during which he reflected upon the full breadth of his artistic endeavours. Among countless pleasures, this book provided my first encounter with Cage’s poetry. More than any other writing I know, Cage’s poems (he calls them mesostic texts) feel to me like choreography – in the way that a single idea is pulled apart and reconfigured over an expanse of time, moving beyond the explicit language employed to call up images and juxtapositions that emerge, transform, catalyze and dissolve.

As the centenary of Cage’s birth approached, I began experimenting with his mesostic texts as the basis for movement scores. The process was instantly exciting and generative, so I began listening in earnest to his many works for prepared piano. Commissioned to create a brief solo for dancer Brian Lawson, I chose Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp, composed in 1947, and the beauty and fascination I found in that first dance led directly to the decision to tackle Cage’s epic Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.

Piano/Quartet arose through that foundational solo for Brian Lawson (who worked alongside Sahara Morimoto); through subsequent choreographic research during two residencies in Philadelphia (Dance Advance, Pew Centre for the Arts and Heritage / Bill Bissell, director) involving dancers Gregory Holt, Bethany Formica and Shannon Murphy, and ultimately through intensive work with dancers Ric Brown, Sean Ling, Andrea Nann, and Sahara Morimoto.

Caroline O’Brien created a sensational wardrobe that allowed the dancers to switch up costume pieces for each scene; Marc Parent devised a gorgeous and eventful lighting design; and the production was completed with a series of beautiful, painterly projections by Larry Hahn. Upstage centre seated at a grand piano, completely unflustered by the flashing changes in the lighting and projections, and by the rustle, footfall, heavy breathing and constant movement of the dancers, pianist  John Kameel Farah gave an astonishing series of virtuosic performances of some of the 20th Century’s most challenging and daring music. PB

“…mesmerizing…Epic in scope, inventive in structure and emotionally nuanced…” Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

Cirrus (1997/2000)

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A faculty member of The Juilliard School since 1995, Irene Dowd has been a foundational presence in Peggy Baker’s dance life, providing neuromuscular training and creating Cirrus on and for Peggy in 1997. Peggy explains:

“It’s beautiful to think back to this brief and exquisite dance, choreographed by my dear friend and cherished mentor Irene Dowd. Beginning in 1985 – and continuing over the next two decades – Irene guided me in discovering the inner landscape of my body, in all its mystery and magnificence, through an evolving movement practice grounded in functional anatomy.

In 1997 we shifted our focus to a dance choreographed for me by Irene. In a recent exchange of memories around our process, Irene remembers being under the sway of two important paintings by her late husband, Charles Stokes – the dazzling and rhapsodic Perpetua (which he was just completing) and the labyrinthine Inner Temple (which was newly underway).

Irene titled the dance Cirrus, as she felt the definition – “a tendril, a long thread-like organ by which a plant climbs; a light fleecy cloud at a high elevation” – sounded as though it was describing the movement. We had created in silence, but once the work was completed, I suggested dancing it with a John Cage work titled Dream. I didn’t have a chance to perform Cirrus until 2000, when it premiered as part of an evening titled Interior View. Irene allowed me to finish her dance by reaching my hand to the piano on the last note. No photographs of this dance exist, so it remains a treasured memory.” PB

To see an example of Irene’s approach to teaching functional anatomy through choreography, visit her website here.

To learn more about artist Charles Stokes, visit SeattleArtResource here.

Photo of Irene Dowd by Matthew Karas.

furthermore (1999)

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If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that by 1999, pianist Andrew Burashko and dancer Peggy Baker had been touring Canada and the USA together for almost a decade. They often included a piano work for Andrew to perform without any dance, and in this week’s blog Peggy recounts how Andrew’s choice of Piano Music No. 2 by John Cage led to the creation of furthermore:

“For this particular composition, Cage had employed the chance procedure of taking flaws in the manuscript paper on which he was notating and assigning them musical notes, some of which would be played on the keyboard, and some by striking or plucking the string directly, reaching inside piano. This piece therefore required that the musician stand at the piano in order to be able to play both the keyboard and the strings simultaneously, while also shifting their weight to extend a leg to work the pedals that sustain or dampen notes. I found the movements required of Andrew quite beautiful, and highly choreographic.

In the fall of 1999 Andrew presented his first recital program for a new music performance initiative under his artistic direction, Art of Time Ensemble. Contemporary music by Americans John Cage, Peter Lieberson, George Crumb, Sebastian Currier ,and George Gershwin was brought together in a program titled Fascinatin’ Rhythms. Along with Andrew, the stellar musicians on the program included Steve Dann (viola), Beverley Johnston (percussion), Barbara Hannigan (soprano), and Joel Quarrington (double bass). I danced to Cage’s Piano Music No. 2, and my choreography was an elaboration on Andrew’s actions so that the work became both a piano solo and a movement duet. I titled the premiere and, moreover, and later renamed it furthermore, though I can no longer imagine why I thought it needed to be changed…” PB

To read more about how John Cage redefined music, visit NPR here.

Art of Time Ensemble has become a live performance juggernaut in Toronto. Andrew’s company presents an annual season of concerts that fuse high art with popular culture. To listen to a selection of their recordings visit Soundcloud here, or their YouTube channel.

Why the Brook Wept (1996)

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As Peggy Baker and Andrew Burashko continue developing their repertoire together, Andrew suggests another John Cage score, Ophelia, composed for the American dancer Jean Erdman in 1946. Peggy writes about her response:

“That the music had been written explicitly for a choreographic portrait of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet was both compelling and intimidating, and I hesitated to take it on. But the more I listened to the music, the more amazed and fascinated I was by the ways in which it captured Ophelia’s dilemma. Finally, I could not turn away.

To begin with, I worked strictly with the script of the play developing sequences, scenes and images based on the text. Once I had worked my way through the words I went back to the music, allowing the score to guide me in arranging, distilling, and refining the choreography. Also very much on my mind was the John Everett Millais painting Ophelia, (1851-2), which I had seen at the Tate in London many years earlier. I chose not to research the original choreography, so there are no intentional allusions to Erdman’s dance in my own. The description of Ophelia’s death as a fall “into a weeping brook” inspired my title.

One of the most potent images the music inspired for me was the idea of the pianist as Hamlet, and his performance of the score as his own wrenching self-interrogation. So the piano is positioned in profile on stage left, with the pianist’s back is to the dancer. At the end of the piece, the dancer is left on the floor, crumpled against the back legs of the piano bench, and once the final notes have decayed, the pianist closes the keyboard, stands and closes the piano’s lid and exists the stage. Whenever we performed this work, it closed the program, including on Art of Time Ensemble’s program, If music be… first staged in 2010.” PB

“The two dance sequences are beautifully rendered: Tanya Howard and Patrick Lavoie, as choreographed by James Kudelka in the Act III scene where Romeo and Juliet part after a night of lovemaking; and the remarkable Peggy Baker dancing Ophelia’s madness to music of John Cage to close the show.”
- John Terauds, The Toronto Star

"Cage composed the music for a 1946 dance by Jean Erdman, but Baker has made it her own, as much acted as danced.  She passes through a full spectrum of moods, from languor to frenzy.  When Burashko closes the piano and leaves her fallen figure on the stage, it is the spirit leaving the body." 
- Susan Walker, The Toronto Star

To learn more about the work of John Cage watch John Cage. From Zero here on Youtube.

In a Landscape (1995)

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The music and influence of John Cage is peppered throughout Peggy’s work, and it all began back in 1995…

“Pianist Andrew Burashko and I often gave one another books or CDs as gifts, and for our opening night at The Kitchen in New York in 1995, he gave me a CD of solo piano music by John Cage performed by Stephen Drury. The first track on the album was a piece from 1948 entitled In a Landscape. I instantly feel in love in with the music’s gently cascading melodies and the cresting and lulls of its compositional asymmetries. I lucked into an opportunity to perform a new work for fFIDA, (Toronto’s sadly no-longer Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists), and because Andrew was elsewhere, teamed up with pianist Henry Kucharzyk for the premiere.

The music took me inside of what I described then as my “creature body” – an interior world of sensations and movements riding the contours of joints and the pathways of blood, bone and muscle. The cycles of ritual that emerged elicited fragile balances and distortions that carved the lines of movement like the scarring and pruning used to cultivate a bonsai. Though this dance is brief, it moves through a timeframe that opens and elongates every second. The original staging of this work included a stunning costume by Jane Townsend – a kind of cocoon for the torso that left my bare arms and legs looking like the appendages of an insect – and a set of sculptural pieces by Kurt Swinghammer, some of which glowed at various times. Marc Parent, who lit this original version, later created a completely different treatment that called on the dancer to navigate a constantly morphing circle of light (imagine a rotating lava lamp projected onto the floor) that was devilishly difficult to balance within and which gave the impression of a dancer moving on a surface sliced out of the Milky Way.  

I hold dear performances of In a Landscape with Henry, and later, and over many years, with Andrew. Performances of this dance by others, most especially Christopher T. Grider, Tanya Howard and Andrea Nann, have moved me deeply. “ PB

"A finely crafted solo, with carefully articulated movement perfectly matched to a John Cage composition." - Lewis Hertzman, Dance Magazine

“The estimable Andrea Nann puts her personal stamp on Baker’s 1995 solo In a Landscape; the choreographer’s own remembered presence in the same work hovers like a distant echo.” - Michael Crabb , The Toronto Star

Listen to Kurt Swinghammer being Interviewed by Steve Waxman here on The Creationists.
Watch the documentary John Cage. From Zero here on YouTube.